Daily Queens Game — Friday, June 19, 2026

About 10x10 Queens puzzle #42

Board #42 of the 10x10 bank carries a easy rating. Its 100 squares are shared between ten colored regions, and the solution places ten queens: one per row, one per column, one per region, none of them side by side or corner to corner.

As with every puzzle in this collection, #42 has a single verified solution and needs no guesswork. Each queen follows from something already visible. What the board controls is tempo — how soon the first forced move shows up and how far apart the rest are spaced — and that is a direct consequence of how these colors are cut.

How the colors divide this board

From smallest to largest, the regions on puzzle #42 are: blue (1 square), mint (2 squares), amber (3 squares), pale yellow (5 squares), khaki (6 squares), sea green (9 squares), orange (12 squares), red (17 squares), slate (22 squares), indigo (23 squares). An even split would hand every color 10 squares, so the blue region is running 9 squares under that average while the indigo region is the roomiest area on the grid with 23 squares.

That imbalance is the first thing to read, because every region takes exactly one queen regardless of how much space it owns. Blue has only 1 place to put its queen; indigo has 23. The spread between them on this board is 22 squares, and the wider that spread runs, the more it pays to solve from the small end inward.

Shape matters as much as size. The blue region is the most compact color here, filling 100% of the 1×1 box that encloses it, while sea green is the most scattered at 56% of its 4×4 box. Compact regions are easy to eliminate around; straggling ones reach into more rows and columns and tend to stay unresolved until late.

Region by region

The complete breakdown of each region on this board follows, ordered from tightest to roomiest. Skimming the spans first tells you where the board is crowded and where it has slack.

Blue: 1 square across rows 3–3, columns 1–1. It never leaves row 3, so its queen is locked to that row.

Mint covers 2 squares, spanning 2 rows and 1 column (rows 3–4, columns 10–10). It sits wholly inside column 10, so its queen must be in that column.

Amber occupies 3 squares within rows 1–2, columns 9–10.

Pale yellow: 5 squares across rows 4–7, columns 1–2.

Khaki covers 6 squares, spanning 3 rows and 3 columns (rows 8–10, columns 3–5).

Sea green occupies 9 squares within rows 7–10, columns 5–8.

Orange: 12 squares across rows 5–10, columns 8–10.

Red covers 17 squares, spanning 5 rows and 6 columns (rows 6–10, columns 1–6).

Slate occupies 22 squares within rows 1–7, columns 5–9.

Indigo: 23 squares across rows 1–5, columns 1–6.

Where to start on this board

The most constrained color is where a solve should begin, and on #42 that is blue with 1 square. It reaches from row 3 to row 3 and from column 1 to column 1 — 1 row by 1 column. One queen has to live inside that footprint no matter what else happens, which makes those lines the busiest real estate on the board.

Because blue never leaves row 3, its queen must be in that row — and that instantly settles row 3 for everyone else. Sweep along it and X out every square that is not blue. Then look at which colors just lost ground: on a grid this size that one observation usually forces a second region within a move or two.

Work outward to the other flat regions next. Amber and mint are no more than two rows tall, so their queens are confined to a narrow band. When two flat regions overlap the same pair of rows, those rows are spoken for and every other color is locked out of both — the single most productive pattern in the game, and it is live on this board.

The tightest lines on puzzle #42

A quick way to find the next move is to count how many different colors touch each line. On this board, rows 1 and 2 are the narrowest, touched by only 3 colors. Column 7 is the tightest column, with 2 colors.

The fewer colors a line touches, the sooner it surrenders its queen. A row meeting just 3 colors has to be claimed by one of them, which pushes every remaining region into the other 9 rows. Row 7, meeting 5 colors, is the opposite case — the busiest line on #42 and the last one you should expect to crack.

Working through the middle game

Once two or three queens are down, the board changes character. Each queen removes an entire row, an entire column and the ring of up to eight squares around it, so the grid shrinks faster than most people expect. The habit that pays here is marking rather than remembering: after every placement, cross out the full row, the full column and all eight neighbours before hunting for the next move.

Keep alternating between two views of the board. In the region view you ask which of the ten colors is down to one open square. In the line view you ask the same of each row and column. Both produce forced queens, and each placement refreshes the other view, so cycling between them deliberately is how a 10x10 board unwinds.

Say the reason out loud: "this region has one square left", "this column has one square left". If no such sentence is available, the eliminating is not finished. One more pass of X marks is almost always quicker than committing to a placement you cannot defend.

Why puzzle #42 is rated easy

Ratings track how generous the opening is. On #42 you get three regions pinned to a single row or column, a smallest color of 1 square, a tightest row crossed by 3 colors, and a 22-square gap between the largest and smallest regions. Those four numbers largely explain the easy label.

Difficulty in Queens is never arithmetic and never luck. Every board has one solution and none require guessing. What varies is the length of the chain you must follow before the next queen becomes certain — one or two steps on an easy board, five or six on a hard one, sometimes with several partial eliminations held in play at once.

A board that feels above its rating is nearly always a board with a missing X. Audit every queen on the grid: full row cleared, full column cleared, all eight touching squares cleared. Diagonals are the common omission, and missing one is far more often the cause of a stall than any genuine difficulty in the puzzle.

Techniques that work well at 10x10

At 10x10 a full re-scan after every move starts to get slow, so work locally instead. Once a queen goes down, check only the regions, rows and columns that placement actually touched — that is where new information appeared. Fall back to a complete sweep only when the local pass turns up nothing, and your solve times will drop noticeably.

One pattern is worth learning at every size, and it is available here. When two regions can only fit inside the same two rows, they must take one row each — which locks every other region out of both. The same argument works for columns, and for any matching count: three regions sharing three rows, four sharing four. Spotting these pairings turns a slow grind into a quick cascade, and on #42 the place to look for one is around column 7.

Here is a shape check that gives nothing away: when #42 is solved, 4 queens sit on the outer edge of the grid and 6 sit inside it, and no queen lands in a corner. A work-in-progress board that clusters its queens in one quadrant while leaving others bare is usually carrying a mistake.

What makes the daily Queens game special

The daily Queens game challenge is one carefully chosen puzzle that is the same for every player around the world. A new board goes live every day at midnight UTC and stays as the day's official puzzle until the next reset. Because everyone is solving the identical grid, the daily becomes a shared experience: you can compare how you approached it with friends, talk through the tricky deduction in the middle, or simply enjoy the quiet satisfaction of knowing you cracked the same board as solvers everywhere else.

Like every puzzle on the site, the daily Queens game online is completely free, needs no sign-up and runs instantly in your browser so you can play Queens online in seconds. It is designed to be a perfect bite-sized brain exercise — long enough to feel earned, short enough to fit into a coffee break. Solving it keeps your daily streak alive, and the streak is a gentle nudge to come back tomorrow and keep the logical part of your mind warmed up.

How today's puzzle is chosen

Each day's board is drawn from our larger library of verified puzzles, so the daily inherits the same cast-iron guarantee as the rest of the site: it has exactly one solution and that solution is always reachable by logic alone, never by guessing. The grid size and the specific puzzle rotate from day to day, which keeps the routine varied — some days you will face a brisk smaller board, other days a meatier grid that rewards a slower, more methodical solve.

Because the selection is deterministic and tied to the date, the puzzle you see today is exactly the puzzle every other player sees today, and it is exactly the puzzle that will sit at this date forever in the archive. There is no randomness between players and no way to refresh into an easier board — the challenge is fixed, fair and shared, which is precisely what makes comparing solves with other people meaningful.

Replay the full daily archive

Missing a day is never a problem here. Every past daily challenge is preserved in the archive, so you can step back to any previous date and play that day's board exactly as it appeared. This is something the original LinkedIn-style daily does not let you do, and it turns the daily from a one-shot novelty into a deep, replayable collection you can binge whenever you like.

The archive is also a great way to practice. If today's grid size suits you, browse backward to find more boards of the same shape, or work through the history in order to feel how the puzzles vary over time. You can move directly between consecutive days using the previous and next links, jump to any date from the archive list, or branch out into the full puzzle library whenever you want even more to solve.

A simple daily solving routine

A reliable routine makes the daily quick and stress-free. Begin by reading the colors: find the smallest or most awkwardly shaped region, because a cramped region usually forces its queen into one of very few squares. Then sweep the rows and columns for any line that already has only a single open cell, since a queen must go there. Place those forced queens first and let them do the heavy lifting.

After every placement, immediately mark X's on the squares that queen rules out — the rest of its row, column and region, plus every neighboring square it touches. These marks keep the board honest and constantly expose the next forced move. When easy moves run out, hunt for pairs of regions confined to the same rows or columns; identifying those locked lines is what breaks open the harder daily boards. Work in calm passes, trust the logic, and the final queen will click into place.

More ways to keep playing

If one puzzle a day is not enough, the Queens game online keeps you covered. Dive into the archive to replay history, or open the full library of more than 1,800 puzzles across six grid sizes, from quick 7x7 boards to demanding 12x12 grids. Every one of them follows the same friendly promise: one queen per row, one per column, one per color region, none of them touching, and a single solution you can always reach by reasoning rather than luck.

However you choose to play, the daily challenge is a great anchor for the habit. Solve it each day to protect your streak, use the archive to catch up on anything you missed, and lean on the wider library whenever you want to push your skills further. It is a free, friendly, guess-free logic puzzle that is always ready when you want to think.